Here’s what you need to know about the Irish media: A large amount of economic and financial policy gets promulgated through interviews on RTE radio. And when Morgan Kelly writes an op-ed in the Irish Times, pretty much everyone reads it.

Mr. Kelly is a University College Dublin economist who gained attention for sage predictions in 2007 on the unhappy end of the Irish housing boom. He eschews television, grants few interviews and holds his fire for months before unloading a few thousand words.

The latest barrage came Saturday. The piece strongly merits a read. Mr. Kelly is a talented polemicist who knows how to wield a declarative sentence. (Of Ireland’s central-bank governor, he writes: “Honohan’s miscalculation of the bank losses has turned out to be the costliest mistake ever made by an Irish person.” Such is Mr. Kelly’s reach that Mr. Honohan scrambled the next day to the radio to defend himself.)

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Mr. Kelly also teases out tension between the International Monetary Fund and the European Central Bank, who were supposedly “partners” in the Irish bailout:

On one side was the European Central Bank, unabashedly representing Ireland’s creditors and insisting on full repayment of bank bonds. On the other was the IMF, arguing that Irish taxpayers would be doing well to balance their government’s books, let alone repay the losses of private banks. And the Irish? On the side of the ECB, naturally.

In the circumstances, the ECB walked away with everything it wanted. The IMF were scathing of the Irish performance, with one staffer describing the eagerness of some Irish negotiators to side with the ECB as displaying strong elements of Stockholm Syndrome.

The bailout represents almost as much of a scandal for the IMF as it does for Ireland. The IMF found itself outmanoeuvred by ECB negotiators, their low opinion of whom they are not at pains to conceal.

Mr. Kelly’s solution (which he admits stands no political chance) is for Ireland to “walk away from the bailout.” That involves stopping the merry-go-round that is keeping the Irish banks spinning (Ireland takes the banks’ bad assets, gives them government debt, banks borrow cash from ECB against that government paper, Ireland uses bailout money to plug capital holes).

And most importantly, it involves bringing “the Government budget immediately into balance.” Mr. Kelly admits that this is “not painless.”

Here, then, is an essential truth about all the euro-zone bailouts: So long as a government runs a deficit, particularly a primary deficit, it is in thrall to its lenders. And when there are no lenders, and there is only the EU, then the government is in thrall to the EU.

Just how “not painless” is disentangling from the EU-IMF bailout? Mr. Kelly doesn’t expound, but here are some numbers.

Ireland is projecting a government deficit of €14.8 billion this year, just under 10% of gross domestic product and right around €10,000 per Irish household. Refusing bailout money means Ireland needs to plug that gap on its own.

The country is planning to spend €5.3 billion on interest payments to creditors this year. Even walking away from all the country’s debt would cut the deficit only by a little more than a third. Returning the budget to balance will require serious pain.

The same is true for Greece, which is why talk of Greece’s quitting the euro zone seems far-fetched (or at least premature). Greece’s budget deficit this year should be around €16.8 billion. And though a lot more of that is interest, Greece still needs someone giving it money, unless it can find a way to save billions more.

About Real Time Brussels

The Wall Street Journal’s Brussels blog is produced by the Brussels bureau of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones Newswires. The bureau has been headed since 2009 by Stephen Fidler, who was previously a correspondent and editor for the Financial Times and Reuters. Also posting regularly: Matthew Dalton, Viktoria Dendrinou, Tom Fairless, Naftali Bendavid, Laurence Norman, Gabriele Steinhauser and Valentina Pop.